


Funeral

by antinomian



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:21:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22991641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antinomian/pseuds/antinomian
Summary: this is basically unedited and the last fic i wrote was for warrior cats so if this sucks thats why
Comments: 7
Kudos: 52





	Funeral

There is a man standing over her father's grave.

He cuts a sharp figure, dark against the pale sky, and she can't see his face from where she's standing, but he looks like family, has the pitch hair and the almost unhealthy looking skin and the lean proportions. She hadn't noticed anyone obviously missing from the service, but she wouldn't be surprised if she had forgotten someone; the family is big, and she hasn't made a point of keeping track of cousins.

She hopes he's done by the time she gets there, though. The past few days have been hell, what with planning a funeral and a burial and telling people and getting sympathy after sympathy after sympathy until she's absolutely sick of the word "sorry." All she wants is a quiet moment to actually say goodbye.

When she is within speaking distance and the man has still not moved, Margaret Barrow takes a deep breath and prepares to have the same conversation she has been having all day.  
"Miss the funeral?" She asks, and tries to make it sound lighter than it is.

He turns, and she stops dead, stops walking, stops breathing, because it's Thomas. He is taller and older and a good deal more worn-looking than the last time she saw him, but there is no mistaking it.

He doesn't move. He looks at her with tired eyes and regards her with an expression betraying nothing of his thoughts or feelings.

Oh," she breathes, and it feels like he is smiling wryly even though his expression doesn't change.

Thomas looks down at the headstone and pulls a drag off a cigarette she hadn't noticed, which draws her eyes to an umbrella hanging over his elbow.

"Didn't want to intrude," he says, finally, quietly.

She nods because she doesn't know what she could possibly say. It has been a long time since she entertained a hope of her brother coming home; at some point she had simply accepted that there was no way a person could be so proud as to keep away for two decades, and that it was probable he had starved, or caught pneumonia, or, if he'd lived long enough, been shot during the war. But he is here, alive, and apparently whole.

A tiny drop of rain pricks at her arm, and she looks up at the thick clouds above them. Thomas takes the umbrella off of his arm and opens it mechanically, but when he holds it above his head he does so in a way that suggests she join him.

Standing next to her brother, not speaking, and looking down at her fathers grave, she feels estranged from herself. Nothing is real but the wind that slips through the seams of her clothes and into her body.

"I don't know why I bothered," Thomas says. "He wouldn't've come if I'd died." He doesn't look at her.

"I think he thought you already had," Margaret says. "I did." She doesn't look at him.

Thomas takes another drag off his cigarette, and nods. He flicks the butt onto the ground, not on the grave but distinctly not not on the grave; she doesn't comment on it.

"Well," he starts, and stops, and looks at her unreadably. "I'd best be going."

She almost told him to stop, wait, couldn't they talk, but he was pressing the handle of the umbrella into her palm and turning away, and then he was gone, walking through the drizzle across the graveyard, away from her, again.

If she were not left with an umbrella, and were the butt of the cigarette not still weakly smouldering on the ground, she would have thought the whole thing had been a dream.

**Author's Note:**

> this is basically unedited and the last fic i wrote was for warrior cats so if this sucks thats why


End file.
